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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Melancholia'
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Newton, Michael William. "Mark making and melancholia in painting : a language for visual representation of the melancholic." Thesis, Bath Spa University, 2014. http://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/5164/.
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What are the elements (marks) that support a melancholic narrative in painting and in particular how can they be harnessed to heighten the feeling and create an 'authentic' melancholic work from a painting of simple and natural motifs? summarise the changes in the meaning of the term melancholia, especially in the last two centuries, and discuss the validity of melancholy painting today. I summarise the key developments to the debate in the 1980s between the artists and the theoretical art critics and hypothesise that paintings that refer to this 'death of painting' are inherently melancholic. I seek out the "language of marks" for expressing melancholy by extrapolating from an examination of 100 paintings but fail in my attempt to quantify them objectively. The assumption that feeling is grounded in the formal properties is tested through detailed examination and subjective analysis of key extant works, concentrating specifically on how colour and expressive mark-making can be used by the artist to enhancing the emotional content. I use examples of extant paintings to show that it is possible to use context as a way of adding to the melancholic content of a contemporary painting. Practical Study The practical research takes the form of painted samples, copies of extant contemporary works, explorations of melancholic motifs (metaphors) and finally a body of work testing the integration of the theoretical analysis with the practical work. Conclusions In addition to melancholic meaning being grounded in the formal properties of a painting, expressive marks can be appropriated and re-presented but the requirement for them to be authentic is open to conjecture. However, referencing the 'death of painting' can enhance melancholic content without the use of irony or becoming kitsch.
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Buzková, Petra. "Čtení." Master's thesis, Vysoké učení technické v Brně. Fakulta výtvarných umění, 2014. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-232407.
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Semper, Samantha. "Conversion : melancholia, masculinity, and psychic change." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/33734.
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This study chooses three representations of conversion and asks whether these might challenge or ‘talk back’ to discourse about conversion, or whether they simply transfer a deeply problematic melancholic attachment structure? This analysis considers three primary case studies: the religious conversion of St. Augustine as represented in his Confessions; John Howard Griffin’s white racial conversion narrative, Black Like Me; and the Hip-Hop conversion testimony of Caesar L. Willis, Rude Awakening, and his associated spiritual-autobiographical dance practice of krumping. The first two chapters specifically deal with religious conversion: Chapter One offers a reinterpretation of the role of the maternal and paternal object in religious conversion, and Chapter Two proposes a rereading of the conversion of St. Augustine using this model. The remaining chapters analyze conversion discourse in relation to, and from embedded stances within, the dynamics of racialized oppression and legacy of slavery in the United States of America.
The philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva carefully distinguishes between “revolt”, from the Latin, revolvere, a productive ‘return’ and ‘rolling’ over of psychic structures, and the conversion, or conversio, turning, of the Christian man. She argues that religious conversion, the turn to religious faith, that ends in “reconciliation” or “unification” is a compromise: “a primary identification with a loving and protective agency” that is compensatory (24). It is a “fusion” with a “nourishing, loving, and protective” “breast” that is “transposed from the mother’s body to an invisible agency located in another world” (24). Building from this, my analysis argues that this compromise is a specifically melancholic compromise marked by the splitting and fusion with the maternal part-object, which is retained in a dynamic of “rejection, yet attachment to”. Because religious conversion is built on a drive toward ‘wholeness’ that is achieved through the fusion with a part-object, it does not represent an ethical relation or productive revolt. However, this analysis asks whether there are examples of conversion that do not end in a melancholic compromise, but instead open up to what Ranjana Khanna calls “critical melancholia” (22).
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Fong, Chung-yan, and 鄺頌欣. "Melancholia and autobiography in Roland Barthes." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1997. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31951259.
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Brisley, Lucy Anne. "Beyond melancholia : Algeria and its spectres." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:237deb07-8961-4532-b19b-2507e7135b68.
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This thesis problematizes the recent transdisciplinary turn to melancholia by grounding the concept within the literature of three contemporary Algerian authors: Assia Djebar, Yasmina Khadra, and Boualem Sansal. If Freud figured melancholia as a pathological response to loss, much recent scholarship has reconceptualized it as an ethico-political model of remembrance that safeguards the memory of the lost or marginalized other. Yet the recent and ubiquitous depathologization of melancholia is only possible insofar as theorists overlook its more insidious elements. By analyzing how melancholia emerges within the postcolonial novels of Djebar, Khadra, and Sansal, this thesis reveals how melancholia in fact undermines an ethico-politics of remembrance, further displacing those lost others that theorists of melancholia would recuperate. Divided into two sections, the first part of the thesis thus challenges the ethico-political viability of melancholia as a mnemonic model. Through close readings of the texts, the first four chapters reveal postcolonial melancholia in Algeria to be imbricated in amnesia, immobility, repetition, victimhood, apolitical retrospection, and the unethical appropriation of the lost object. Part II investigates how the authors imagine different models of remembrance that move beyond the limits of the mourning and melancholia dyad. If melancholia has been depathologized, it nonetheless remains ensnared within a binary system in which the subject either forgets (mourns) or engages in a putative act of hyper-remembrance (melancholia). Building upon the recent theory of Dominick LaCapra, Mireille Rosello, and Judith Butler, the final two chapters explore the critical potential of ‘working upon’ the past. As an on-going and conscious model of remembrance, ‘working upon’ actively resists the closure inherent to mourning but it also circumvents the melancholic (re)appropriation of the past and its lost others. Ultimately, then, this thesis signals the need for emergent models of memorialization that move beyond the restrictions of the Freudian binary of mourning and melancholia.
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Fong, Chung-yan. "Melancholia and autobiography in Roland Barthes." Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1997. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B18685523.
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Hawkes, Percy. "Complicated Grief and Melancholia| Identity-Questioning Issues." Thesis, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10076222.
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Through hermeneutic and heuristic research this thesis looks at melancholia or complicated grief with the contributing factor of identity questioning. From a depth psychological perspective, normal grief is differentiated from melancholia or complicated grief, which involves the unconscious. This exploration employs the theory of Allan Hugh Cole Jr., whose work on melancholia draws on that of Donald Capps, Erik Erikson, and Sigmund Freud. A disposition to melancholia, particularly in men, comes from the first abandonment by a primary parent, resulting in identity loss and resistance to resolution of grief. Factors such as trauma, sexual orientation, religion, or marginalized race can have exacerbating effect on melancholia and were found to have treatment implications. Ritual, art, play, humor, and dreams can be identity-conferring and restorative resources. The author proposes that melancholia with identity issues should be understood as a psychological problem that is distinct from, although it can prolong and complicate, grief.
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Dzika-Jurek, Kamila. "Problem ciężaru : melancholia w twórczości Magdaleny Tulli." Doctoral thesis, Katowice : Uniwersytet Śląski, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12128/5562.
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The basic aim of this dissertation is to describe the melancholic dimension (with a particular focus on the source of this emotion) of Magdalena Tulli’s works – one of the most interesting contemporary Polish writers. At the same time, it is a completely new look at the prose of the Warsaw writer because up to now researchers and critics dealing with Tulli’s writings have pointed out their far from melancholic – even provocatively “light,” postmodern character. To the works of the Warsaw prose writer stuck, among others, the stigmatizing term of “the literature made of literature” that simultaneously denied these novels referential abilities. The author of dissertation, on the contrary, already at the beginning of her paper formulates the research hypothesis, according to which all novels of the Warsaw writer – from the debut novel Dreams and Stones to the latest, published in 2014 Noise – have the same bitter, melancholic tone and carry a “burden” of a real (autobiographical?) story.
Most researchers seemed not to notice that self-referential stories from Tulli’s writings may refer to a specific reality. They wrote about them that they are merely a “technique exercise in fictionalization”, and motifs of this prose that they found obscure, described as “writing eccentricity.” Only the publication in 2011 of autobiographical (“easy” – according to the author) Italian High Heels, as it turned out, finally allowed Tulli to “communicate” with readers – as she described in one of interviews – in “the issue that was important to her.” This “issue” is the trauma of war and concentration camp which the writer’s mother somehow survived as well as the entire, as Tulli writes in Italian High Heels,” “energy of violence” and contempt which resulted from this and long after the war still destroyed people’s lives, unfortunately, including the life of the author of Moving Parts, just at its beginning – the writer’s childhood. Therefore, the sad background of the author’s life, as it turns out the source of melancholy in her works, became in some way the background of this dissertation.
Before the publication of autobiographical Italian High Heels, when reading Tulli’s novels I wondered about remarkable consistency with which the writer uses certain metaphors in her prose and the presence of recurring motifs in these writings. Since even if – I thought at this time – assuming that the fundamental lack of plot in the works of the author of Dreams and Stones justifies their “postmodern” reading, why such talented and after all appreciated author would continuously write books about the same thing? Thus, the most important question to me seemed to be: what is the reason behind the Warsaw writer’s persistence in the style – in the “letter” of the novel, its constructions, means of imagery.
Autobiographical character of Italian High Heels confirmed my previous assumptions and inclined me to the deeper insight into this artistic offering which at its sources turned out to be profoundly melancholic. The writing of Magdalena Tulli was literally simply built on the trauma, on the early (childhood) experience of lack and loss. Revealed by the writer in Italian High Heels and in the latest novel Noise painful facts from her biography (above all a toxic relationship with her mother) turned out to be this “burden” – the figure that consistently from the debut appeared in Tulli’s writings, and which with some intuition and interest I followed from my first reading of these texts.
At the same time, becoming familiar with the state of research on the topic of melancholy, allowed me to formulate the assumption about the constant presence of the figure of burden in melancholy: from the moment of the appearance of the famous Hippocrates’ humoural theory till the present day (for instance, in Antoni Kępiński’s psychiatric works). Therefore, although melancholy can be described from many different perspectives (aesthetic, anthropological, existential, philosophical, etc.) in many different terms and languages (Latin – acedia, Greek – splen and English – spleen, ennui, Danish – Tungsind, etc.) – in every case they contain the element of gravity or burden. That is why the starting point of my dissertation and “research background” to interpret selected Tulli’s writings is the synthetic look at the melancholy presented throughout the centuries by artists and scientists, with special emphasis on the significance (“rank”) of the figure of burden and synonymous figures.
In essence, the entire prose of the Warsaw writer (what I note scrupulously in every analytical part of my dissertation) is steeped in the imagery of burden. Why? This question is answered by the author of In Red herself, since in the centre of her two last novels (Italian High Heels and Noise) she puts her mother – former prisoner of concentration camps. Simultaneously, in this way Tulli reveals that at the foundation of the world in which she lives (and which is the prototype for the world of her novel) lies her toxic relationship with her mother. The Warsaw prose writer writes literally about the “burden” of suffering which her mother bears since the war and the part of which she always tried to “transfer” onto her child (Tulli).
This issue reveals in the depiction of melancholy as a posttraumatic disease. Its main cause is the "touch" of history, sensual experience the trauma of war that was marked the writer’s mother so painfully. That is why the author of Flaw metaphorizes melancholy in her writings also as “an infection” of memory which contaminates consecutive generations of the Shoah (the second, third etc.) and which has become the experience of the Warsaw writer. As a result, we are born into a reality which already carries a certain “burden”. The space of Central Europe, once the epicenter of the Shoah, is a special example thereof. It is a space where the “burden” of the substance of the Shoah can sometimes be felt through the senses. The matter building the contemporary world still contains elements of the war, a material trace of the war – ashes of human bodies, “fat” clay in which the victims of the war were buried. That is why the tangibility of the world after the Shoah is so important in the works of the author of The Lottery. The most important representation of this landscape destroyed by the war is, literally, the mother from Italian High Heels whom her daughter describes as “the empire”. It is her who carries the biggest burden in this world, attempting to pass on some of the “weight” to the child. Her particular, cold attitude towards the world and people close to her, the cold “icy blue” stare and “stiffened” poses she assumes are to metaphorize this coldness and emptiness of the post-war (post-concentration camp) world where long after the war bonds between people will still be undermined by the floating “energy of suffering, sorrow and hatred”. This energy is absorbed by the children, consecutive generations “poisoned” in a metaphorical and literal (via genes) sense by the Shoah.
When read from this perspective, the works of Magdalena Tulli reveal their extremely interesting rhythm. They emerge as an example of a mature, “full” literary structure, planned by the author herself to the tiniest details in which some aspects of a melancholic's life resurface in a compulsive (unconscious) manner. This indicates a special meaning of the interpretation of these works, which, for insightful readers, discloses new possibilities of literary study of these writings: penetrating the “areas” which no science apart from philology feels competent to access, studying today (what the author of In Red seems to be especially aware of) the text as “an adventure of the body and signs”.
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Paul, Haajra. "Rituals of Mourning and Melancholia in Dubliners." Thesis, Malmö universitet, Fakulteten för kultur och samhälle (KS), 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-21346.
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Sorensen, Eli Park. "Postcolonial melancholia : theory, interpretation and the novel." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2007. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1446117/.
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In my doctoral dissertation, I discuss and explore notions of the literary and literary form in postcolonial studies. Beginning with a focus on recent expressions of unease about the theoretical paradigms through which the postcolonial perspective responds to literary texts, I discuss the emergence of what I call postcolonial melancholia, an atmosphere induced by the increased institutionalisation in academia in recent years. Using Freud's notion of melancholia, as a form of ghostly identification with an absent object, I explore what leading critics have seen as a loss of contemporary postcolonial criticality, and which I see as intimately related to the problematic ways in which the dimension of the literary has been used. In the second part of my dissertation, I analyse and discuss various literary strategies as formulated in three formally different postcolonial novels---Ousmane Sembene's Xala, J.M. Coetzee's Foe, and Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance---in order to map the contradictions, limitations but also possibilities of novelistic representation in postcolonial space. My overall critical perspective will be informed by the works of Georg Lukacs, and in particular his notion of a utopian-interpretive realist ideal, developed in the early work Theory of the Novel. My argument is that this utopian-interpretive realist ideal can also be seen as a particularly useful notion in connection with what I see as the literary dimension in many postcolonial novels, as it is situated in between complex socio-political agendas and aesthetic-representational problematics. Lukacs's formal-literary ideal is repeated in his later writings on realism from the thirties, but notably in a transfigured way---as an extra-literary, authoritative norm. The dynamic of this trajectory, one that moves from idealism to dogmatism, can (with certain modifications) be seen as similar to the development of the field of postcolonial critical discourse---moving from an early, idealistic beginning, to an increasingly dogmatic, prescriptive and authoritarian academic discourse. By using the trajectory of Lukacs's realist ideal as a comparative background, I attempt explore alternative ways of conceiving postcolonial literariness ways that may help the field of postcolonial studies to come to terms with what I see as the symptom of postcolonial melancholia, haunting the contemporary discipline.
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Fowler, Rebekah Mary. "Mourning, Melancholia, and Masculinity in Medieval Literature." OpenSIUC, 2011. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/336.
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This dissertation examines male bereavement in medieval literature, expanding the current understanding of masculinity in the Middle Ages by investigating both the authenticity and affective nature of grief among aristocratic males. My focus is on the pattern of bereavement that surfaces across genres and that has most often been absorbed into studies of lovesickness, madness, the wilderness, or more formalist concerns with genre, form, and literary convention, but has seldom been discussed in its own right. This pattern consists of love, loss, grief madness and/or melancholy, wilderness lament/consolation, and synthesis and application of information gleaned from the grieving process, which is found is diverse texts from the twelfth century romance of Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain to the fifteenth century dream vision/consolatio Pearl. A focused study of how bereavement is represented through this pattern gains us a deeper understanding of medieval conceptions of emotional expression and their connections to gender and status. In other words, this project shows how the period imagines gender and status not just as something one recognizes, but also something one feels. The judgments and representations of bereavement in these texts can be explained by closely examining the writings of such religious thinkers as Augustine and Aquinas, who borrow from the neo-Platonic and Aristotelian schools of thought, respectively, and both of whom address the potential sinfulness and vanity of excessive grief and the dangers for this excess to result in sinful behavior. This latter point is also picked up in medical treatises and encyclopedic works of the Middle Ages, such as those of Avicenna and Isidore of Seville, which are also consulted in this project. The medieval philosophical and medical traditions are blended with contemporary theories of gender, authenticity, and understanding, as well as an acknowledgement of the psychoanalytic contributions of Freud and Lacan. Through these theories, I explore the capacity for the men in these texts to move beyond the social strictures of masculinity in order to more authentically grieve over the loss of their loved ones, which often constitutes a type of lack. However, my purpose is not to view losses as lack, but rather, to see them as a positive impetus to push beyond the limits of social behavior in order to realize textually various outcomes and to suggest the limitations of such socially sanctioned conventions as literary forms, language, rituals, understanding, and consolation to govern the enactment of grief.
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Madden, Christopher. "W.G. Sebald and the work of narrative melancholia." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.531240.
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Clark, Simon J. "Undead melancholia : from lost modernism to haptic antagonism." Thesis, Goldsmiths College (University of London), 2013. http://research.gold.ac.uk/10430/.
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My written thesis modifies George Romero’s zombie in an effort to exhume the critical potential of melancholia. The notion of melancholia as a dissenting condition has been rendered obsolete within contemporary culture. I equate the shift from melancholia to depression with the emergence of the postmodern climate that collapses radical opposition from the outside by assimilating dissent within its own operations. The subversive qualities of melancholia are superseded by the classification of depression as a dysfunctional inability to assimilate the logic of capitalist production. I initially formulate my own psychoanalytical term – undead melancholia – to describe the figure of the zombie. I then use the notion of sublimation to rewrite undead melancholia as a utopian phantasy of transgressive subjectivity in which life willingly acquiesces to an emancipatory marriage with death. This fiction of a radical new strain of zombie is understood as a melancholic phantasy of an oppositional critical strategy that has now been lost within contemporary homogeneity. I then discuss the zombie as an abject walking corpse that collapses Symbolic meaning altogether. This reading of the zombie undoes my own formulation of undead melancholia as a transgressive subject position, and re-articulates it as a haptic materiality beyond subjectivity instead. I finally propose a performance practice that might ape the materiality of undead melancholia by interrupting the formal and normalised protocols of contemporary culture. This performative melancholia, as a haptic antagonism, would refuse to consent absolutely to the status quo, asserting that the homogenous procedures determining contemporary cultural production are contingent negotiations rather than essential conditions. My recent performance practice involves staging unexpected musical interventions at various conferences, symposia, art events and exhibitions to which I have been invited as a guest speaker. This work confounds the professional protocols and the normalised codes of behaviour associated with these events.
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Mitchell, Jonathan Paul. "Religious melancholia and the York Retreat, 1730-1830." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2018. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/20753/.
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This thesis will examine the hitherto understudied area of Georgian Quaker spirituality, and bring it to bear on the historically significant York Retreat asylum. The York Retreat opened in 1796 to serve the Quaker community. It was managed by the Tukes, an influential family of Quaker religious leaders. Georgian Quakers had a rich and idiosyncratic introspective tradition and spiritual life. Their spirituality entailed a depressive piety which escalated to despair, restrictive eating or suicidality in several narratives from Georgian Quaker religious leaders. It was common for Georgian Quakers to interpret these episodes of affliction from the perspective on religious melancholia common to several other radical dissenting movements, in which such episodes were seen as a divinely ordained trial that would ultimately add to the gravity and authority of the afflicted, and prepare them for a religiously orientated life. Yet this concern with religious melancholia has escaped the notice of previous writers on the York Retreat. The thesis will first examine Quaker worship, the cornerstone of Georgian Quaker practical theology. It will then show how religious doubt, despair and affliction were intrinsic and causally efficacious parts of Georgian Quaker narratives of spiritual progress, before examining accounts of religious distress in Quaker biography and at the York Retreat. This thesis therefore provides an alternative narrative on the early years of the York Retreat. The York Retreat will not be approached as a site of innovation in secular humanistic psychiatry, but as a relic of dissenting modes of experiential religion and religious melancholia. In so doing, the thesis will show that assumptions around a link between Quaker spirituality and the ‘moral treatment’ regime are unfounded; the liberal humanism of contemporary Quakerism has been imputed onto the history of the York Retreat by supporters and critics alike. Instead, it will be shown that Quakers gradually incorporated narratives of nervous affliction into their accounts of religious affliction, reflecting the longrunning embodied aspect of religious distress, at a time when it was not unheard of for the devout to be supported in religious reconciliation and bodily healing from within a madhouse.
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Burkey, Adam P. "Prisoners of Loss: Melancholia in Contemporary American Literature." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1374594525.
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Nanayakkara, Gauri. "Performers' Rights Regime in Sri Lanka : singers' melancholia." Thesis, University of Kent, 2016. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/54508/.
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The recently institutionalised global Performers’ Rights Regime (PRR) aims to improve the economic position of those performers whose work can be audio-recorded and reproduced. This thesis asks whether the PRR achieves this aim. The thesis investigates this question through a case study of Sri Lankan vocalists. Vocalists in Sri Lanka are a significant constituent within the music industry, and they had hoped that the PRR would make their work more economically secure. However, this thesis finds that the PRR, as developed internationally and implemented in Sri Lanka, is predicated on a particular understanding of the role of performers and their relationships with other actors in the music industry; that this understanding of performers’ roles and relationships does not reflect established practices and relationships within Sri Lanka’s contemporary music industry; and that consequently the PRR fails to deliver the improved economic security that Sri Lankan singers had sought.
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Vu, Dorothy. "“Maternal Melancholia”: Reading Diasporic Asian Canadian Motherwork in the Fictions of Kerri Sakamoto, Hiromi Goto, and Madeleine Thien." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/31802.
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What does it mean for an immigrant to be a “good” mother? Asian immigrants in Canada experience pressures to assimilate to a “normal,” homogenous ideal of Canadian culture—to erase aspects of their own cultural identity as well as their diasporic history. Asian mothers specifically are subject to mothering ideologies that depict white, middle-class, happy mothers as the norm. This thesis examines literary depictions of this phenomenon in novels by Kerri Sakamoto, Hiromi Goto, and Madeleine Thien. Each of these authors offers representations of motherhood that counter racialized and gendered ideals of mothering, and that refuse to ignore the sometimes traumatic effects that diaspora can have on immigrant families. Through David Eng and Shinhee Han’s notion of “racial melancholia”, I argue that the mothers in these novels conduct “maternal melancholia,” a form of motherwork that subverts dominant ideologies of mothering, resists assimilation, and sustains losses incurred through racialization and diaspora.
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Sil, Esha. "Representing Adda : radical capitalism, Bengaliness and post-partition melancholia." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2013. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/5553/.
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This doctoral dissertation examines the popular Bengali leisure pursuit, adda, which may be defined as a long, informal talking session among friends, interspersing intellectual discussion and debate with gossip, rumour and small talk. Taking its cue from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s acclaimed essay on the Calcutta adda, my thesis analyses how the social practice of adda functions as a cultural signifier of ‘something quintessentially Bengali’. Such a general assumption of adda’s ‘quintessential Bengaliness’, I argue, is problematised by the present geo-political identity of ‘Bengal’ as a region straddling two different nation-states, namely West Bengal in India, and Bangladesh (former East Bengal). I correspondingly deconstruct the discourse of adda’s ‘quintessential Bengaliness’ along two key theoretical axes – adda’s radical capitalism and post-Partition melancholia. Adda’s radical capitalist premise postulates the economic, sociological and political significance of adda’s leisurely work ethic as a challenging alternative to the hegemonic epistemology of a globalised Western capitalism. Adda’s post-Partition melancholia demonstrates how the overarching West Bengali Hindu representation of this ‘quintessential’ talking practice can be traced back to the 1947 Bengal Partition. Employing a range of historiographical, literary and cinematic sources in conjunction with Edward Said’s contrapuntal reading methodology, my thesis interrogates the Hindu bhadralok master-discourse of the Calcutta adda to explore the marginalised adda narratives of various ‘other’ Bengali communities – both in West Bengal and Bangladesh. For this purpose, I revaluate the West Bengali bhadralok hierarchy against the contrapuntal grain of adda’s different subaltern space-times, including those inhabited by the East Bengali refugee, the West Bengali tribal, the bangal woman, and the Bangladeshi modern. I thereby mobilise both the radical capitalist productivity and critical melancholic agency of adda’s diverse representational imaginaries – preeminent and submerged, normative and transgressive, metropolitan and peripheral, to establish their dynamic presence as the heterogeneous constituents of a post-Partition Bengali contemporaneity.
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Chan, Wai-chung, and 陳慧聰. "The discourse of the body, abjection, melancholia and carnival." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2000. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31952562.
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Pearl, Monica B. "Alien tears : mourning, melancholia, and identity in AIDS literature." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1999. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4310/.
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This thesis examines the literary response to the AIDS crisis. It concentrates on literature produced between 1988 and 1995, published in English, and available in Britain and the United States. The AIDS texts investigated here are representative of other AIDS literature produced during this time period in the way that they both enact and construct the identities of those affected by AIDS. Mourning and melancholia are the operative responses revealed in the literature, and revealed as the formative components of changing identities in response to AIDS and its manifestations. The thesis is structured in six chapters: a theoretical introductory chapter that proposes mourning and loss as pre-existing concerns in gay men's literature, followed by a chapter addressing gay AIDS fiction and its narrative response to mourning. The next two chapters examine hybrid texts, that is, AIDS texts that do not conform to a conventional narrative form, and that are connected more firmly to a queer sensibility than to a gay identity. These texts, the thesis claims, are engaged with the processes (and resistances) of melancholia rather than with the work of mourning. The subsequent chapter addresses fictions of caretaking and witnessing, that is, novels written from the point of view of one who is caring for an other ill with AIDS. These are identified as more mainstream texts as they involve representations that are not connected to declared sexual identities and therefore mean to address a wider audience and to work out a more public discourse of grief around AIDS. In conclusion, the thesis suggests that although AIDS literature is involved in an effort to resist loss through narrative form, in fact it is the literature that in some instrumental ways makes the work of mourning and melancholia in response to AIDS productive rather than debilitating.
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Stamova, Darina. "Melancholia in W. G. Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn"." Access to citation, abstract and download form provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company; downloadable PDF file, 115 p, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1654488641&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=8331&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Chan, Wai-chung. "The discourse of the body, abjection, melancholia and carnival." Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 2000. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B22199676.
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Wyllie, Martin. "Merleau-Ponty and melancholia : the practical application of Merleau Ponty's 'body-subject' in establishing a description of the temporal aspect of melancholic suffering." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2003. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.274850.
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In this phenomenological study I concentrate primarily on three component features of melancholia, namely: temporality, suffering and how both these features as a result of our condition as embodied subject’s as already engaged in the world. In undertaking this I will use the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty as developed in his book the ‘Phenomenology of Perception’ (1962). The conceptual framework used in this study is developed upon the premise that the correct subject of psychopathology is the ‘person’ characterised as an active agent within a world-context. By adopting the perspective of an embodied subject (body-subject) in the world, derived from Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the embodied subject, one can eliminate some of the intellectual confusion relating to certain philosophical distinctions, generally, and, of more relevance for this study, to psychiatric diagnostic categories specifically. The argument is that the body, in terms of anatomy and physiology, is always intertwined with both the subject’s intentionality, that same subject’s bodily intentionality and the world. The physical structure of the embodied subject lays the foundation for our way of being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world is characterised as relational and dialectic in that one’s relationship with the world changes both the world and the embodied subject in ways which either promote or hinder health, illness and/or suffering. An important part of my argument is that human suffering occurs as a result of agency and/or illness and that suffering is inseparable from one’s personal perspective and the world-context that influences one’s personal perspective. The concept of suffering, developed in this study, challenges an ideological tenet of the traditional medical model: namely, that there is objective knowledge, knowable apart from subjective experience. The concept of suffering, developed herein, places tension on this tenet, and if this tenet is preserved as inviolable then it follows that the prevailing reductionist medical model has little to say about suffering.
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O'Connor, Bryan M. (Brian Michael) 1958. "A Lacanian reading of Boswell's morbid will : melancholia and "angst"." Monash University, Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, 2000. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/8768.
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Çelik, Kutluay Burçe. "Addicted bodies: cellular telephony, melancholia and individual articulation in Turkey." Thesis, McGill University, 2008. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=19291.
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Cellular telephone technology was adopted in the so-called developing countries more quickly and passionately than in developed countries. This was true in a developing Turkey. Cellular telephony in contemporary Turkey defines a social practice, collective attachment and even an addiction of sorts. This study produces a possibility of understanding why and how the cellular telephone has become so popular and an object of collective attachment/addiction in Turkey. This dissertation aims to produce a social study of technology, in particular Turkish cellular telephony, by attending to the social, political, economic, cultural, historical and affective conditions within which cellular telephony as a social practice emerged in Turkey. In this work, I attempt to understand why and how the cellular telephone has become a collectively attached and widely imitated technology in Turkey, by exploring its performance in relation to the possible conditions giving rise to the emergence of cellular telephony as a social practice. I situate the performance of cellular telephony not only on the basis of its obvious meanings and visible instrumental functions but also via the desires, imaginations, inclinations, wishes, purposes, sensations that it responds to and reproduces. By drawing relevant arguments from philosophy of technology, psychoanalysis, sociology, post-phenomenology, Turkish critical studies and literature and by benefiting from resources such as cellular telephone users, print, visual and electronic media, this work produces a possibility of understanding why and how cellular telephony becomes an appealing and an attachable technology for marginalized bodies.La technologie de téléphonie cellulaire a été adoptée à travers les pays dit en développement plus rapidement et ardemment que dans les pays développés. Ce phénomène étant valable en ce qui concerne la Turquie. L'utilisation massive de la téléphonie cellulaire dans la Turquie contemporaine a introduit une nouvelle pratique sociale, en plus d'induire un attachement collectif ainsi qu'une forme de dépendance liée à son usage. Cette étude tente de comprendre le comment et le pourquoi de ce nouveau paradigme, les causes de cette popularité, ainsi que les raisons qui en on fait un objet d'attachement/dépendance collectif en Turquie. Cette thèse a pour objectif d'étudier la technologie, en particulier de la téléphonie cellulaire turque en mettant l'emphase sur la vie sociale, politique, économique et culturelle ainsi que sur l'histoire qui a contribué à créer cette relation affective en Turquie. J'explorerai le succès des technologies en regard des conditions donnant lieu à l'émergence de la téléphonie cellulaire en tant que pratique sociale. Je situe la performance de la téléphonie cellulaire non seulement dans sa signification évidente et visible de fonctionnalité, mais aussi à travers le désir, l'imaginaire, les inclinaisons, les souhaits, les buts, les sensations à travers lesquelles elle se reproduit et auxquelles elle répond. En me basant sur les discours dérivants de la philosophie, de la technologie, de la psychanalyse, de la sociologie, de la post-phénoménologie, et des études critiques et littéraires turques, ainsi que par le biais de ressources provenant de témoignages d'utilisateurs de téléphones cellulaires, d'impression et d'images tirées de médias électroniques, ce tr
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Jinks, Sean Ernest. "Writing the unwritable : melancholia in the works of Mikhail Zoshchenko." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2012. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/13998/.
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This study seeks to show how the literary legacy of Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894-1958) can productively be understood as a sustained textual engagement with the writer's own melancholia. Drawing equally on present-day critical approaches which increasingly emphasize the unity of life and art in the works of Zoshchenko, and on a psychoanalytically-influenced model of textual melancholia, this study posits and analyzes a melancholy component of the broader comic aesthetic that typified Zoshchenko's early work and on which, to a large degree, Zoshchenko's reputation still rests today. The study then proceeds to trace the development of this textual melancholia beyond its aesthetic representation in earlier works to show an increasingly direct discursive elaboration of the condition in works written after 1927. This evolution in the textual refraction of the writer's melancholia is shown to extend into the writer's later 'medical' works where they acquire a more or less explicit therapeutic function and become a kind of culturally nuanced Soviet language of melancholia. This development is contextualised by reference to Soviet conceptions of mental illness and a Soviet medical establislunent characterized by an unusually dominant physiological understanding of the mind. Throughout, the study aims to demonstrate how a reading of the Zoshchenko oeuvre in terms of melancholia can deepen and broaden critical understandings of this enigmatic writer, opening up a hitherto neglected ideational component of Zoshchenko's art.
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TORRES, FERNANDA LOPES. "YVES KLEIN, ANDY WARHOL AND JOSEPH BEUYS: PLACES OF MELANCHOLIA." PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO, 2006. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/Busca_etds.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=10053@1.
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PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIROCONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO
Lugar da contingência radical da arte, nos anos 1960 e 1970, tal como proposta pelas obras do francês Yves Klein, do norte- americano Andy Warhol e do alemão Joseph Beuys, o lugar-melancolia dimensiona a crise contemporânea da substância poética a partir da iminente saturação pública da arte. Por que agir quando toda ação é absorvida homogênea e acriticamente? Como se portar diante de uma realidade aparentemente refratária a qualquer valor? Destituídas da realidade da obra como espaço íntegro da possibilidade de ação e conhecimento, tais subjetividades artísticas fragmentárias apontam, segundo nossa hipótese, novas coordenadas para a capacidade produtiva do homem. Klein, Warhol e Beuys elaboram personas artísticas públicas a fim de circular com desenvoltura no iminente contexto cultural aberto, crescentemente dominado por formas de cultura de massa. Esses artistas se identificam com certas categorias artísticas, mas propõem a revitalização da arte a partir do ponto de indiferença entre potência e não-potência poética - condição precípua do dar forma ao mundo e, conseqüentemente, a nós mesmos.
A place of radical contingency in art in the 1960s and 1970s, as proposed by the works of Frenchman Yves Klein, American Andy Warhol and German Joseph Beuys, the place of melancholia gives a dimension to the contemporary crisis concerning the poetic substance in view of the imminent public saturation of art. What is the point of taking action when all action is absorbed both homogeneously and acritically? How should one behave when faced with a reality which would appear resistant to any value? Bereft of the reality of the artwork as an unmarred space for the possibility of action and knowledge, we propose that these fragmentary artistic subjectivities set a new route for man´s productive capacity. Klein, Warhol and Beuys developed public art personae to circulate freely in the impending context of open culture that was increasingly dominated by forms of mass culture. Though they are identified with certain artistic categories, these artists set out to revitalize art from the point of indistinction between poetic potency and non-potency - an essential precondition for shaping the world, and therefore, for shaping ourselves.
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Machado, Elsa Cascais Silva Andrade. "Masculinity, melancholia and misogyny in the films of Sam Peckinpah." Doctoral thesis, Universidade de Aveiro, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10773/22904.
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Doutoramento em Estudos CulturaisWith this thesis I have attempted to analyse three salient features in Sam Peckinpah’s films: masculinity, melancholia and misogyny. Having made only fourteen films, Peckinpah distinguished himself as an important director in the history of American cinema not only because of his innovative techniques but also because his work was so much in tune with the zeitgeist of the turbulent times in which he lived. The analysis of these three main themes aims to cast some light on the work of a director whose temperamental traits and difficult relation with the film industry tend to obfuscate an un-romanticized view of his oeuvre. Peckinpah’s best work was within the generic traits of the Western but he also made forays into other genres, never forsaking the main worries and worldview that give his films a sense of thematic coherence. While American cinema is inclined to foreground a strong patriarchal hegemonic model, Peckinpah’s films, although centered on masculinity, unwittingly undermine this model by disclosing flaws and weaknesses in his protagonists, rendering them more vulnerable and prone to suffering. This singularity allowed me to bring into relief the elegiac mood of his films, a characteristic which entwines with the perception of a fading West and with the obsolescence of his male characters. Peckinpah became notorious in his association with misogyny not only because of his impromptu comments in the interviews he gave but also because he displayed a problematic relationship with women in real life, giving them a dismissive treatment in his films. This thesis attempts to deal with this unsavoury feature which many critics disavow or simple ascribe to inflamed feminist criticism. I hope in this work I have managed to address the richness of Peckinpah’s films and to reveal how he left a legacy which surpasses the technical artistry for which he became known and the violence which he stylised with the details of his obsessive directorial flair. This legacy lies in the melancholy mood that suffuses his work, resulting from disenchantment and loss.
Com esta tese procurei abordar três aspectos que se salientam na obra de Sam Peckinpah: masculinidade, melancolia e misoginia. Tendo realizado apenas catorze filmes, Peckinpah distinguiu-se na história do cinema Americano não apenas pelos elementos técnicos inovadores mas também pelo facto de os seus filmes estarem em sintonia com o zeitgeist dos tempos turbulentos em que viveu. A partir da análise destes três aspectos, pretendi realçar o trabalho de um realizador cuja personalidade temperamental e a difícil relação com os estúdios tendem a obfuscar uma exploração menos romanticizada do seu trabalho. Apesar de se ter distinguido no Western, Peckinpah aventurou-se por outros géneros, nunca abandonando as principais preocupações e mundividência que conferem ao seu trabalho uma coerência temática. Enquanto o cinema Americano promove um modelo fortemente patriarcal e hegemónico, os filmes de Peckinpah, apesar de se centrarem na masculinidade, tendem a subverter este modelo ao colocarem em evidência as falhas e fraquezas dos seus protagonistas, que se revelam vulneráveis e mais suscetíveis ao sofrimento. Esta singularidade permitiu-me sublinhar a disposição elegíaca dos seus filmes e a sua relação com melancolia, uma característica que se associa à perceção de um Oeste em declínio e ao anacronismo dos seus protagonistas. Peckinpah ficou marcado pela sua postura misógina não apenas através dos seus comentários precipitados e irrefletidos, presentes nas várias entrevistas que concedeu, mas também porque manifestou uma relação problemática com as mulheres, algo que se refletiu na forma como as tratou e representou no ecrã. Esta tese procura assim abordar uma vertente menos agradável da sua obra que muitos críticos minimizam ou percecionam como resultado de uma crítica feminista inflamatória. Espero assim que, com este trabalho, tenha conseguido explorar a riqueza do cinema de Sam Peckinpah, demonstrando que a herança que este nos deixou ultrapassa em muito a técnica artística dos seus filmes ou a violência que ele explorou exaustivamente com a sua entrega à realização. Esta herança reside na melancolia que atravessa o seu trabalho, resultante de desencanto e perda.
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Mas, Soler Roger. "Apocalyptic cinema as an earnest thought of death. Kierkegaard and Melancholia." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/456026.
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L’objectiu d’aquesta tesi doctoral és argumentar en favor de la potencialitat d’algunes pel·lícules apocalíptiques per ser una ocasió especial per pensar seriosament en la pròpia mort en els termes descrits per Søren Kierkegaard al discurs “Al costat d’una tomba” (1845). Per assolir aquest objectiu, primer examinaré els pensaments sobre la mort en l’obra de Kierkegaard, en la qual l’autor danès critica l’aproximació externa a la mort i subratlla la seva inexplicabilitat i el seu irreductible aspecte subjectiu. En aquesta secció em centraré específicament en el que s’afirma en el discurs esmentat. En segon lloc, defensaré el cinema com un mitjà privilegiat per transmetre l’imaginari apocalíptic. En tercer lloc, examinaré l’àmbit de les pel·lícules apocalíptiques per definir un tipus de cinema—que anomenaré cinema apocalíptic de mostratge [“montrage apocalyptic cinema”]—que, a tenor de les idees de Kierkegaard sobre la mort a “Al costat d’una tomba”, serà considerat una ocasió especial per pensar seriosament en la pròpia mort. En relació a això, argumentaré que, per les seves característiques—que giren al voltant de l’ambigüitat essencial de la nostra existència—, aquestes pel·lícules apocalíptiques tenen la capacitat de permetre’ns confrontar subjectivament i apropiar-nos del pensament de la pròpia mort. I finalment, analitzaré Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011) com un exemple paradigmàtic d’aquest tipus de cinema apocalíptic de mostratge.The aim of this dissertation is to argue the potentiality of some apocalyptic movies to be a special occasion to think earnestly about one’s own death in the terms explained by Søren Kierkegaard in the discourse “At a Graveside” (1845). In order accomplish this, I will first examine Kierkegaard’s thoughts on death in his corpus, in which he criticises the external understanding of death and underlines its inexplicability and its irreducible subjective aspect. In this section I will focus specifically on what is stated in the aforesaid discourse. Second, I will defend cinema itself as a privileged medium to convey the apocalyptic imaginary. Third, I will examine the field of apocalyptic movies in order to define a type of cinema—which will be called montrage apocalyptic cinema—that, in the light of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on death in “At a Graveside”, will be considered as a special occasion to think earnestly about one’s own death. In this regard, I will argue that, for their features—which revolve around the essential ambiguity of our existence—, these apocalyptic films have the capacity to allow us to subjectively confront and appropriate the thought of one’s own death. And finally, I will analyse Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) as a paradigmatic example of this type of montrage apocalyptic cinema.
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Kim, Rina. "Beyond mourning and melancholia : women and Ireland as Beckett's lost others." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2007. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4108/.
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Beckett's female characterization in his later works is, in marked contrast to his earlier work, broadly in sympathy with the notion of 'feminine' style and feminist concerns. Yet in his earlier texts, the female is grotesque, devouring, sexually provocative, and silenced. It can be argued that Beckett's representations of the female and Ireland intersect, and change as his relationship to Ireland and an Anglo-Irish tradition changes. Proposing that Beckett's self-imposed exile has influenced such changes, this thesis, using a psychoanalytic framework, traces discourses of mourning, melancholia and abjection in his works, and demonstrates how Ireland and women are often the objects of loss in the psychoanalytic model. By exploring the correlations between the representations of Ireland and the female throughout Beckett's oeuvre, this thesis aims to shed new light on Beckett's literary practice as well as contributing to the fields of Irish and feminist studies.
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Cakirlar, Cuneyt. "Disidentification, mimicry, melancholia and image : queer reconfigurations in contemporary visual arts." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2008. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/17073/.
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This thesis analyses expressions of queer tendencies in contemporary visual arts. Its main objective is to focus on gender-conscious strategies of performative excess realized by mimicries and triggered by identification and identity troubles. I use 'queer' to conceptualize a performance which perturbs hetero-normative dialectics of visual representation and disrupts the dynamics of its fixating recognition. I refer to the word 'tendency' in order to indicate the latency and/or the valency of the image in such a performance. Concentrating on the oeuvres of David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, Del LaGrace Volcano, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Gilbert & George, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Todd Haynes and Derek Jarman, this thesis attempts to rethink ethics and aesthetics in the intersecting domains of queer theory, pastiche and contemporary artistic practice. My work focuses on the visual discourses of pastiche and parody in order to critically investigate the possibilities and the impasses of strategic mimicries, for instance the rhetoric of 'drag', with regard to representation. My case studies explore sexually informed methods of miming and pastiching and investigate the kind of dialogue that such narcissistic textual modes of queer self-consciousness might provoke. I read the art-works of these nine artists in terms of their possible affinities with queer problematizations of prevailing ideas about sexed, gendered, sexualized body. I treat these modes of mimicry, such as drag, copy, camp, pastiche and parody, within a logic of textual and sexual penetrations and consider them as queer practices of improper incorporations in the field of vision. My thesis further advances the argument that the queer performativities and thus the postmodern pastiche-effects in these visual modes encode a liminalized authorial signature, as well as authored modes of deviant temporalities. By means of detailed discussions of these nine key figures, I aim to demonstrate various author-functions in queer narrations of body and to consider ways in which they diversely utilize the aggressively melancholic and/or the radically narcissistic possibilities of the Queer in a critical aesthetic practice of surface and depth.
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TAVARES, VICTOR MORETO SILVA. "MELLON COLLIE AND THE INFINITE SADNESS: ROCK, MELANCHOLIA AND CONSUMER SOCIETY." PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO, 2012. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/Busca_etds.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=21946@1.
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PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIROEste trabalho tem como objetivo discutir a sociedade de consumo, o rock and roll e a manifestação da melancolia na segunda metade do século XX, em especial a partir dos anos 1990. Conjugados, esses termos representam um diálogo íntimo e combinatório, que nos ajuda analisar a sociedade sob diferentes aspectos: a produção musical e seus reflexos sociais; a melancolia – e sua conceituação – com crescente relevância em diagnósticos e percepções; a sociedade de consumo como campo, tanto para o surgimento do rock quanto para a aparição do fenômeno melancólico; e a própria relação rock x melancolia que ora denuncia, ora é produtora de significados sociais. Entram em discussão as noções sobre individualismo, linearidade, invisibilidade social, fetichismo mercadológico e a falência do conceito de progresso.
This thesis discusses the consumer society, rock and roll and the manifestation of melancholia in the second half of the twentieth century, especially since the 1990s. Together, these terms represents an intimate dialogue which helps us to analyze the society in different aspects: music production and its social consequences; melancholia - and its concept - with an increasing relevance in diagnostic and perceptions; consumer society as field for the emergence of rock as to the appearance of the phenomenon melancholia; and the relation rock x melancholy that produces social meanings. Also discusses notions about individualism, linearity, social invisibility, market fetishism and failure of the concept of progress.
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Ho, Hannah Ming Yit. "Transformative racial melancholia : depathologising identity in Asian American women's contemporary novels." Thesis, University of York, 2011. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/2249/.
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This thesis examines the relatively new literary field of Asian American literature, and highlights the theme of identity in relation to the recent theories regarding racial melancholia. It takes Freudian psychoanalysis as its starting premise to argue for ‘transformative racial melancholia’ in hybridised Asian American subjects for whom a condition of loss is experienced in the combined processes of immigration, assimilation, and racialisation. I examine several novels by contemporary Asian American women and argue that these texts explore both racial and gender melancholia as conditions of loss. However, I suggest, these novels also demonstrate the process of depathologising melancholia within Asian American subjects and the restoration of a healthy psyche. A positive sense of identity within melancholic conditions is elicited when a healthy psyche is established. My thesis interrogates the way a constructive sense of identity is made available through avenues of intersubjective connectivity and social relations provided by the tropes of memory, history, gender performativity, and political agency. In examining and identifying these intergenerational links, I make a case for the subversion of the early concept of melancholia as individual pathology suffered by the solipsistic victim. My argument emphasises the way livability is generated in sharing, writing, and voicing melancholic losses within a larger collective communality. To this end, communication and language feature as key tools though which to convert losses into gains. To surmise, my thesis puts forward my argument regarding transformation within social interconnectivity that aids in making melancholia productive through the intersubjective management of losses.
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Thew, Emily. "Theorising loss and the nonhuman : melancholia and trauma in contemporary texts." Thesis, University of Sheffield, 2017. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/20039/.
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Since Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ was published in 1917, many theorists have expanded upon as well as critiqued his work in order to think through questions of grief and subjectivity. In this thesis I argue that such questions are generally framed in relation to the human, and suggest that our contemporary moment is increasingly producing literary texts that are particularly concerned with imagining the relationship between loss and the nonhuman. Following David Eng and David Kazanjian (2002), I use ‘loss’ as a theoretical term that ‘names what is apprehended by discourses and practices of mourning, melancholia, nostalgia, sadness, trauma and depression’, and I argue that this term is able to usefully open up such discourses and practices beyond anthropocentric narratives.
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Madaliński, Artur. "Nicość, pamięć, wyobraźnia : o melancholii w prozie Andrzeja Stasiuka." Doctoral thesis, Katowice : Uniwersytet Śląski, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12128/5455.
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Najważniejsze wnioski przedstawiałby się wiec następująco: proza Andrzeja Stasiuka w jednym z centralnych swoich rejestrów stanowi zapis doświadczenia melancholijnego, odwołującego się – w najszerszym planie – do kategorii niezdefiniowanej straty. Pisarstwo autora Dziennika pisanego później w swojej istocie opiera się na fundamencie dialektycznym, który organizację tekstu wyprowadza z paradoksalnego fundamentu kategorii przeciwstawnych. Pustka i pełnia, wypełnianie i sączenie, „przed” i „po”, ruch i bezruch, wieczność i nicość, śmierć i trwanie, forma i jej brak – by wymienić tylko najważniejsze. Dlatego też oprócz enumeracji,
powtórzenia, anamorfozy, czy anamnezy – zasadniczych elementów melancholijnego idiomu pisarskiego – dla Stasiuka ważne będą takie figury retoryczne, jak antyteza, kontrast, czy oksymoron. Wszystkie one będą transfiguracjami mitu czarnej żółci, której takie cechy, jak zmienność, ambiwalencja i nieokreśloność stanowią dla prozy Stasiuka genetyczne, najbardziej w pewnym sensie źródłowe, zaplecze.
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Jansson, Åsa Karolina. "The creation of 'disordered emotion' : melancholia as biomedical disease, c. 1840-1900." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2014. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/8317.
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This thesis traces the re-conceptualisation of melancholia as a biomedical mental disease in Victorian medicine, with an emphasis on the uptake of physiology into British psychological medicine. Language appropriated from experimental physiology allowed physicians to speak about ‘disordered emotion’ as a physiological process occurring when the brain was subjected to repeated ‘irritation’. When it came to diagnosing asylum patients, however, internal biological explanations of disease were of little use. Instead the focus was on externally observable ‘symptoms’, chiefly ‘depression’, ‘mental pain’, and ‘suicidal tendencies’. The late-nineteenth-century symptomatology of melancholia was in part constituted through statistical practices put in place by the Lunacy Commission, and which emphasised certain symptoms and nosological categories in the diagnosing of asylum patients. At the same time, the symptoms that emerged as defining criteria of melancholia were theorised within a biological explanatory framework. Thus, diagnostic descriptions of melancholia travelled back and forth between the casebook and the textbook, producing a disease concept that on the surface displayed remarkable coherence yet simultaneously spoke volumes about the negotiations that take place when medicine seeks to neatly label and classify the complexities of human life. In sum, this thesis shows how melancholia was constituted as a modern diagnostic category in nineteenth-century British medicine. In doing so, it also tells the story of how ‘disordered emotion’ was made into a possible and plausible medical concept.
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Barreto, Clarissa Maia Esmeraldo. "The identification in melancholia: from the lost object to the object a." Universidade Federal do CearÃ, 2016. http://www.teses.ufc.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=17383.
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CoordenaÃÃo de AperfeiÃoamento de Pessoal de NÃvel SuperiorA melancolia à uma afecÃÃo psÃquica caracterizada por dor profunda e terrÃvel sofrimento. Seus estudos ainda hoje despertam questionamentos e querelas no meio psicanalÃtico, principalmente no que se refere a sua categorizaÃÃo como neurose ou psicose. Neste trabalho, partiu-se da dificuldade constatada por meio de revisÃo bibliogrÃfica, tanto em Freud como em autores da atualidade, em precisar o objeto alvo da identificaÃÃo nessa afecÃÃo. Pensar qual a natureza desse encadeamento à importante para se conceber mais especificamente aspectos da clÃnica com sujeitos que padecem dessa estrutura. Nesse contexto, essa pesquisa pretendeu contribuir para o esclarecimento do processo de identificaÃÃo ao que Freud denominou como objeto perdido na melancolia â o qual dà um colorido peculiar a essa afecÃÃo â e lanÃar luzes sobre os debates atuais que envolvem a clÃnica da melancolia. Para tanto, o percurso metodolÃgico se concentrou em duas frentes principais: o estudo do conceito de identificaÃÃo e o desenvolvimento da concepÃÃo de objeto por Freud e a sua releitura estabelecida por Lacan. A partir disso, empreendeu-se uma reflexÃo acerca do que à particular da melancolia, ilustrando os achados dessa pesquisa por meio do caso clÃnico de Louis Althusser, parte final deste trabalho. Um ponto destacou-se dentre os resultados da pesquisa, qual seja: que o objeto alvo da identificaÃÃo melancÃlica, ao qual Freud nomeara de objeto perdido, nÃo à o objeto como causa de desejo, mas sim, o objeto a em sua face real, tal como proposto por Lacan no seu seminÃrio sobre a angÃstia. Esse processo à governado pela identificaÃÃo primÃria ao pai da prÃ-histÃria pessoal, nÃo simbolizada pela identificaÃÃo ao traÃo unÃrio â ou seja, pela incidÃncia do Nome-do-Pai â modelo que se observa especialmente na psicose. Esse fator explica vÃrios aspectos clÃnicos dessa estrutura, como a submissÃo ao impÃrio da Coisa por aÃÃo da pulsÃo de morte, a constituiÃÃo do eu e o suicÃdio.
Melancholia is a psychological disorder characterized by deep and terrible suffering and pain. Its studies still evokes questions among psychoanalytical society, particularly as regards its categorization as neurosis or psychosis. In this work, the authors started with the difficulty found through literature review, both in Freud and in today's authors, in specify the object concerning of the identification in this affection. Thinking about the nature of this linked chain is important to understand more specific clinical aspects with subjects suffering with this structure. In this context, this research intended to contribute to the clarification of the identification process to what Freud called as lost object in melancholia â which gives a peculiar coloring to this condition â and shed a light on current debates surrounding this clinic. Consequently, the methodological approach was focused in two paths: the study of the concept of identification and the development of the object term by Freud and its rereading established by Lacan. From this, the authors analyzed what is particular of melancholia, illustrating these findings through clinical case of Louis Althusser, final part of this paper. One detail shone through the research results, namely: that the target of the melancholic identification, to which Freud had named the lost object, it is not the object as cause of desire, but the object in its real face, as proposed by Lacan in his seminar on anxiety. This process is controlled by primary identification to the father of personal prehistory, not symbolized by the identification to the unary trait â that is, by the incidence of the Name of the Father â a model that is observed especially in psychosis. This factor explains various clinical aspects of this structure, as the submission to the empire oh the Thing by the action of the death instinct, the constitution of the self and suicide.
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Adams, Kelly. "Hunger pangs foodways, racial melancholia, and gender in Asian American chick lit /." [Gainesville, Fla.] : University of Florida, 2009. http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/UFE0024412.
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Eckstein, Lars. "Saturday on Dover Beach : Ian McEwan, Matthew Arnold, and post-9/11 melancholia." Universität Potsdam, 2011. http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2012/5922/.
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This essay revisits Ian McEwan’s extremely successful novel Saturday, and interrogates its exemplary assessment of the British cultural climate after 9/11. The particular focus is on McEwan’s extensive recourse to the writings of Matthew Arnold, whose melancholy outlook on culture and anarchy McEwan basically translates into the 21st century without much ideological fraction. This relapse into Victorian liberal humanism as consolation for a Western world besieged by the contingencies of terrorism is extremely problematic. Not only does it wilfully ignore the transcultural realities of modern Britain, it also promotes an ahistorical and apolitical mode of critical inquiry which may be called reductive at best in view of the global challenges that the novel addresses.
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Wood, Anthony. "Melancholia, mourning and the quest for renewal in the legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien." Thesis, University of Essex, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.605576.
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This thesis analyses the creative theory and practice of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973). In my Introduction, I situate Tolkien's fantastic legendarium within the historical climate of loss pervading the first half of the twentieth century. Using the theories of Sigmund Freud, I argue that personal experiences of such climate and actual losses are manifested in Tolkien's fiction, both as a compensatory mechanism and as a mythopoelic activity. In Chapter One, 1 determine how the psychological dynamics of mourning and melancholia are represented in the themes of fall, exile and mortality that connect the narratives of the chronotopic ages of Tolkien's mythology. In Chapter Two, I evaluate Tolkien as a philologist, and the influence of Gothic and Old English on linguistic structure in The Silmarillion (1977). I constellate his "secret vice" of language invention with the theories of modernist poet Stephane Mallarme. I furthermore determine how these factors influence the symbolic representation of culture in Middle-earth by linguistic means, exploring how words in Tolkien's invented languages evolve from literal signifiers into reservoirs of melancholia. In Chapter Three, I indicate how lost cathexis is regained in The Lord a/the Rings (1954•5) not only through the mechanism of the paternal bond, but also through the creation of ecologically-aware narratives expressing "vistas of history and legend" comparable to the function of dinnseanchas (place-lore) in Irish mythology. In Chapter Four, 1 contend that Tolkien's creative agency stems from deployment of radical nostalgia, and is utilised in such a way as to facilitate mourning and negotiate the collective trauma of apocalyptic "immanence" in the twentieth century. I conclude that this psychological process facilitates a response of renewal in Tolkien's readership
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Hutchins, Michael D. "Tikkun: W.G. Sebald''s Melancholy Messianism." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1307321149.
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Nau, Jesse T. "An Internal Dilemma: Different Approaches to Handling Melancholia in Early Modern Spanish Religious Orders." UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/history_etds/37.
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This study argues that religious orders in early modern Spain developed informal sets of procedures to handle the consequences of melancholia in their communities. It also argues that three influential members of these orders, San Ignacio de Loyola of the Jesuits, and San Teresa de Avila and San Juan de la Cruz of the Discalced Carmelites, tailored these protocols according to their own private concerns and experience with the disease. The changing discourse surrounding melancholia and similar diseases during the early modern period, alongside the unique environmental concerns of these newly founded orders, created a need for new methods of dealing with the disruptions caused by melancholic members of the clergy. These solutions formed out of the immediate needs within each order, but ultimately defined the relationship between melancholic brothers and sisters and their communities.
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Sharma, Natasha. ""I AM FIRST AN ADOPTEE”: HAPPINESS, RACIAL MELANCHOLIA, AND TRANSNATIONALITY IN ASIAN TRANSNATIONAL ADOPTION." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1427304102.
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Hughes, Emily Joy. "Thrown Impossibility: The Ontological Structure of Despair." Thesis, Department of Philosophy, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/9003.
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This thesis is a phenomenological analysis of the ontological structure of despair. It begins with an analysis of Heidegger’s work on ‘Affectedness’ whereby through the critique given by Ratcliffe it is seen that moods are primordial and condition the way the world can matter to the subject. It then expatiates the phenomenology of despair where despair is ‘lived impossibility as such.’ Explicating the phenomenology of despair then involves subjecting Freud’s essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ to a Heideggerian hermeneutic analysis as discussed by Kristeva and Foucault in particular and also Radden more generally. This phenomenology of despair is then drawn into comparison with Heideggerian ‘Anxiety’ and it is concluded that despair is comparable to Heideggerian anxiety when it is subject to a negative existential reduction as put forward by Dreyfus. The final section of this paper then maps the phenomenology of despair onto the temporality of Heidegger’s care structure, ultimately explicating the ontological structure of despair. This involves a close analysis of the radical diminishing of Heideggerian ‘Projection’ or ‘Understanding’ as is reflected in the radical disruption to temporality that occurs in despair, particularly the diminishing of the futural self- the most profound consequence of which is the loss of the capacity to project towards one’s ownmost possibility, that of death. It is argues that death becomes impossible which then means that life itself becomes impossible.
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CHAMON, PAULO HENRIQUE DE OLIVEIRA. "THE MOOD OF TIME(S): MELANCHOLIA AND THE LIMITS OF TEMPORAL THINKING IN WORLD POLITICS." PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO, 2018. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/Busca_etds.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=36301@1.
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PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIROCOORDENAÇÃO DE APERFEIÇOAMENTO DO PESSOAL DE ENSINO SUPERIOR
CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO
FUNDAÇÃO DE APOIO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DO RIO DE JANEIRO
BOLSA NOTA 10
PROGRAMA DE DOUTORADO SANDUÍCHE NO EXTERIOR
Desde o final do século XX, o tempo - enquanto conceito, objeto, tema, ou categoria do entendimento e da experiência - tem sido crescentemente mobilizado como instrumento crítico nas ciências sociais e nas humanidades. De diferentes formas, viemos a ser interpelados a levar o tempo a sério, na busca por lançar luz sobre pressupostos não reconhecidos, esclarecer debates conceituais, aprimorar investigações empíricas, e buscar melhores análises, ações e disposições sociais e políticas. Em particular, os debates sobre política internacional responderam a tal interpelação refletindo sobre os limites e as possibilidades advindas de seus pressupostos temporais, muitas vezes mantidos implícitos. Nesta tese, proponho que, embora não haja como negar estas afirmações nem o importante trabalho delas decorrente, há também boas razões para considerá-las sob uma outra perspectiva. Nesse sentido, abordo essa literatura não tanto em termos da legitimidade das posições articuladas por meio dela, mas em termos das suas condições de existência e dos efeitos decorrentes destas. Mais especificamente, proponho lermos tal proliferação do tempo em termos de uma formação discursiva, isto é, de um conjunto de regularidades que organizam e distribuem o tempo em campos de conhecimento, poder e afetos por meio dos quais podemos a governar a nós mesmos e aos outros. Para tanto, parto de uma leitura de discurso que reúne a ênfase inicial de Foucault em campos de dispersão com uma interpretação de formações discursivas como circuitos de afetos pelos quais elas não apenas são investidas de libido, mas também efetivamente libidinais. Eu então desenvolvo dois argumentos. Em primeiro lugar, trabalhando com debates sobre tempo e política internacional, descrevo os campos de conceitos, objetos, sujeitos e estratégias a partir dos quais tais debates ocorrem. Ao fazê-lo, argumento que eles tendem a reproduzir dualismos como fixidez e fluidez, temporâneo e disjunção, unidade e multiplicidade, necessidade e contingência, assim como metáforas de escalas e inversões que muitas vezes recuperam as próprias concepções de política moderna e subjetividade que buscam contrariar ao levar o tempo a sério. Entretanto, ao invés de interpretar tal ambivalência como um problema, proponho entendê-la em termos da efetividade produtiva do discurso do tempo. Em segundo lugar, caminhando para uma compreensão da melancolia como um modo de articulação de relações discursivas por meio de perda, identificação, reflexividade e prazer, proponho que podemos nomear o discurso do tempo como melancólico. Ao fazê-lo, argumento que tal discurso é não apenas embebido de poderosos efeitos de atração, mas também dá forma particular à melancolia nos nossos dias. Diante dos melancólicos circuitos de poder e conhecimento que são o discurso do tempo, concluo propondo que a proliferação do tempo desde o final do século XX pode nos dizer algo sobre os modos de governo mobilizados na política mundial pelo menos, se não além dela.
In the late 20th and early 21st century, time - as a concept, an object, a theme, or a category of understanding and of experience - has been increasingly lmobilized as a critical category in the social sciences and the humanities. In different ways, we have come to be interpellated by the injunction to take time seriously in an endeavor to shed light on unacknowledged assumptions, clarify conceptual debates, improve empirical investigations, and work towards better social and political analysis, action, and disposition. In particular, debates in International Relations have responded to this interpellation by considering the limits and possibilities coming from its often-unacknowledged conceptions of time. In this dissertation, I surmise that, even though there is no contending with these assertions and the important work stemming from them, there are also good reasons for us to consider them under a different light. In this sense, I engage this literature not so much in terms of the legitimacy of positions articulated in it, but in terms of their conditions of existence and their particular effects. More specifically, I propose we read this topicality of time as a discursive formation, that is, a set of regularities that organize and distribute time in fields of knowledge, affects, and power through which we come to govern ourselves and others. To do so, I start from a reading of discourse that brings together Foucault s early emphasis on fields of dispersion with an interpretation of discursive formations as circuits of affects through which they not only become libidinally invested, but also effectively libidinal. I then develop two arguments. First, by working through debates over time and world politics, I make emerge the fields of concepts, objects, subjects, and strategies under which they take place. In doing so, I argue they tend to reproduce dualisms such as fixity/fluidity, timeliness/disjunction, unity/multiplicity, necessity/contingency, and metaphors of scales and turns that often recuperate the very conceptions of modern politics and subjectivity they proclaim to run counter by taking time seriously. Instead of reading such ambivalence as a problem, however, I venture we should understand it in terms of the productive effects of the discourse of time. Second, moving towards an understanding of melancholia as an articulation of discursive relations through loss, identification, reflexivity, and enjoyment, I propose we can name the discourse of time melancholic. In doing so, I argue that the above discourse is not only embedded with powerful luring effects, but also that it gives particular form to present melancholia. Given these melancholic fields of knowledge-power that are the discourse of time, I conclude by proposing that the topicality of time since the late 20th century can tell us something about the modes of government being mobilized in world politics at least, if not also beyond.
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Hodgson-Blackburn, Jacqueline. "Beyond mourning and melancholia : depression in the work of five contemporary North American women writers." Thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, 1999. http://shura.shu.ac.uk/19804/.
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This dissertation is an investigation into the representation of mourning and melancholia in the work of Elizabeth Smart, Evelyn Lau, Siri Hustvedt, Sarah Sheard and Kathryn Harrison. The thesis addresses women's historic exclusion from the discourse of melancholia from a feminist perspective. It will consider the political and theoretical implications of women's absence from this discursive field by focusing on the cultural legacy of their devalorised status. Freud's essay, 'Mourning and Melancholia', first published in 1917, is cited as an important conceptual model exercising considerable influence over subsequent theoreticians working within this area. My thesis builds on Freud's attempt to establish a clear-cut binary division between the twinned states of mourning and melancholia. The thesis reveals how Freud's construction of melancholia as a pathological condition, shadowing the normative state of mourning, has been linked with psychoanalytic constructions of femininity by leading feminist theorists such as Irigaray, Silverman and Kristeva. The first chapter provides an overview of melancholia as a gendered discourse privileging male practitioners; the subsequent chapters provide symptomatic readings of five novels written by five contemporary North American women. The psychoanalytic interpretation of these readings, ranging from blocked or postponed mourning to the ideological loss of a father through incest, illustrate the close epistemological relationship between the construction of femininity and melancholia within Western historical and philosophical traditions. This thesis is not concerned with merely re-interpreting Western cultural prejudices related to the discourse of melancholia from a late twentieth century postfeminist perspective. Instead, the thesis demonstrates how contemporary women writers are engaged in a revisionary approach to the representation of loss within their work, by insistently inscribing their active, desiring bodies on the discourses of heterosexual femininity and melancholia. By refusing to disappear from the margins of the melancholic text, I show how the resisting melancholic daughter produces a counter-discourse that destroys the conventional dynamics of the family romance within Western literary traditions. The 'writing cure' replaces the 'talking cure' in this context. By removing the patriarchal figurehead from the text, and the psychoanalytic confessional discourse surrounding it, women writers challenge misogynist constructions of femininity within contemporary literature.
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Cheng, Ka-wai Eunice. "The melancholia of the solitary man history, memory and identity in one hundred years of solitude /." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2002. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B31953396.
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Henstra, Sarah Margaret. "Wisdom says forget, the body howls, melancholia and laughter in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the body." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp01/MQ28583.pdf.
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Cheng, Ka-wai Eunice, and 鄭嘉慧. "The melancholia of the solitary man: history,memory and identity in one hundred years of solitude." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2002. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B31953396.
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Flagg, Tracy Claire. "In Ruins: Nostalgia and Melancholia in the Photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, 2005-2013." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1396533009.
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